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MistaT wrote:I don't think I've run into a situation where I wanted to that much or would if I could, but I think I could if I ever really needed to. Y'know in the defense of a loved one or to save the universe or whatnot.

well self defense is legal so

Turns out Funky that our aversion to killing other people goes deeper than just rule of law. Most people have a serious problem with the concept of taking another person's life and even in situations where they are given a free pass an interesting book on the subject On Combat talks about how many people actually fire their weapons effectively in combat situations, I don't remember the exact numbers but it is surprising to see that many people, even in combat situations, still do not want to kill other people.

Now all the hypotheticals where we justify killing someone, because they are an awful person or they harmed someone we love, well that's not different than what we do as a society anyways, and many would argue that killing them would be justified and not murder. However I think most people wouldn't want to pull the trigger themselves and generally rely on the government to prosecute and terminate the person.

Turns out Funky that our aversion to killing other people goes deeper than just rule of law. Most people have a serious problem with the concept of taking another person's life and even in situations where they are given a free pass an interesting book on the subject On Combat talks about how many people actually fire their weapons effectively in combat situations, I don't remember the exact numbers but it is surprising to see that many people, even in combat situations, still do not want to kill other people.

Now all the hypotheticals where we justify killing someone, because they are an awful person or they harmed someone we love, well that's not different than what we do as a society anyways, and many would argue that killing them would be justified and not murder. However I think most people wouldn't want to pull the trigger themselves and generally rely on the government to prosecute and terminate the person.

Some people need to be killed, obviously, but there is already a system in place to do that and, whilst it's far from perfect, it is better than a system in which every individual person gets to decide on their own who to kill and why. That is a recipe for disaster. Some people might have good reasons (e.g. they're about to slaughter a family and this is the only way to stop them in time) but a lot of people would have very bad reasons (e.g. they belong to the wrong kind of ethnic group and everybody knows that those people don't deserve to live). Different people would set the 'person x needs to die' bar at different levels and probably there would be a lot of needless, undeserved deaths.

The process obviously has to be communal in some way then but mob rule is clearly suboptimal, as well. That leaves government. Or, as mentioned, the system that we have already.